The Bridge Trilogy Part 154

And as its doors close he feels grateful that they are excited, and inexperienced, and have cuffed his hands in front, rather than behind his back.

By the time the express elevator reaches Harwood's office floor, he will be alone.

He touches the buckle of his belt, and thinks of the simple yet perfectly efficient tool concealed between the layers of fine Italian calf.

And exists in the moment.

273.

71. YAMAZAKI.

YAMAZAKI. grim and nervous, descends into the early morning rush hour accompanied by a very large Australian, shaven-headed, with one mutilated ear.

"You knew he was here?" the large man asks.

"He desired secrecy," Yamazaki says. "I am sorry."

Yamazaki leads the Australian to the cardboard city and points out Laney's carton and its entrance.

"This one?"

Yamazaki nods.

The Australian produces a knife that telescopes silently at the touch of a b.u.t.ton, both its edges serrated. He slits the top from Laney's carton, lifting it like the lid of a box of cereal, and Yamazaki sees the stickers of Cody Harwood that he glimpsed once before.

The Australian, much taller than Yamazaki, stands staring down into the carton. Yamazaki himself is not yet ready to look.

"What was he running from?" the Australian asks.

Yamazaki looks up at the man's small, fiercely intelligent eyes, set in a face of the most abiding brutality. "Toward,"Yamazaki says. "He ran toward something."

A train arrives in the depths of the system, shunting a wall of stale warm air toward the surface streets and a new day.

274.

FONTAINE comes back from the blackened ribs toward Bryant with ajug of water and two Red Cross sandwiches. It's strange out there, very much the post-disaster scenario and not to his liking.

Media vehicles outnumber emergency, though there are plenty of those. The body count is remarkably low, he gathers, and puts this down to the nature of bridge folk, their seriousness in survival and a certain belief in unorganized cooperation. Probably, he thinks, he'll never know what any of this was about, in terms of causality, though he's sure he's been witness to something.

He hopes Chevette and her boyfriend have made it through, but somehow he a.s.sumes they have, and the professor has gone, off about whatever business a man of his sort pursues, and that is business best not known about. Martial will have to be told that his chain gun is gone, but that's just as well. (Opposite his shop, someone has sprayed a great deal of that stuff called KiI'Z, lest the smear that the chain gun left there prove seropositive in any troublesome way.)

As he comes up to the shop he hears the sound of someone sweeping broken gla.s.s, and sees that it

is the boy, flatfooted in his big white shoes, and sees that the kid's done quite a good job of it, really, down to rearranging things on the surviving shelves. That silver piece of hardware, like an oversized c.o.c.ktail shaker, enjoys pride of place, up behind the gla.s.sless frame of Fontaine's counter, between lead soldiers and a pair of trench-art vases beaten from the Kaiser's cannon casings.

"Where'd she go?" Fontaine asks, looking up at this.

The boy stops sweeping, sighs, leans on his broom, says nothing.

"Gone, huh?"

The boy nods.

"Sandwiches," Fontaine says, handing one to the boy. "We're going to be roughing it out here, for a while." He looks up at the silver cannister again. Somehow he knows it no longer contains her, whoever, whatever she was. It has become as much history, no more, no less than

275.

72. FONTAINE.

the crude yet wistfully dainty vases pounded out of sh.e.l.l casings in some French trench. That is the mystery of things.

"Fonten."

He turns, sees Clarisse there with a shopping bag in her arms. "Clarisse."

Something troubled there, in her sea-green eyes, some worry or concern. "You okay, then?"

"Yes," he says.

"I thought you dead, Fonten."

"No."

"I brought you food."

"The kids okay?"

"Scared," she says. "They with Tourmaline."

"I'd be scared too, then."

A smile twitches the corner of her mouth. She comes forward, s.h.i.+fting the bag aside. Her lips

brush his.

"Thank you," he says, taking the heavy bag, from which fine smells arise. "Thank you, Clarisse."

He sees tears in the corners of her eyes. "b.a.s.t.a.r.d," she says, "where's my dolls?"

"I'm sony," he says, as gravely as he can manage, "but they were victims of the terrible fire."

And then they both start to laugh.

276.

73. SILENCIO.

WHERE did you find it?"

"Treasure Island," the boy lies, pa.s.sing the watch, a solid brown wafer of corrosion, across the gla.s.s countertop.

Silencio peers through his loupe at the damp biscuit of metal. He scores the rust with a diamond scribe. "Stainless," he admits, knowing the boy will know that that is good, though not good as gold. Worth the price of a meal.

"I want to see you fix it," the boy says.

Silencio twists the loupe from his eye and looks at the boy, as if noticing him for the first time.

"I want to see you fix it." The boy points down, indicating the watches arrayed beneath the gla.s.s.

"The bed," Silencio says. "You were here with Sandro, when we restored that Vacheron."

Silencio brings the restoration bed from the rear of the shop, a square cus.h.i.+on, ten inches on a side. He places it on the counter and the boy bends close, to see the velvety green surface made up of millions of manipulators.

Silencio places the watch on the bed. They watch as it rises smoothly on edge, as if of its own accord, and then seems to sink, impossibly, as if through the shallow bed and the gla.s.s beneath.

Vanis.h.i.+ng like a coin set into soft mud...

Silencio looks at the watch on his wrist, a military Jaeger-LeCoultre, RAAF. "Nine minutes," he said. "There's coffee."

"I want to watch," the boy says.

"Nothing to see."